Martinez, Daniel J.

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Digital access to this material is pending artist's approval. Materials may be viewed onsite at the Goldsen Archive, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Kroch Library, Cornell University.

Recently, at a lab in Cambridge, a physicist, aided by a computer, captured
light and then released it. I began to wonder if Genesis would be less
miraculous if "Let There Be Light and Darkness" could be replicated by
intelligent machines? Light is precious, essential for life--from
photosynthesis to epiphanous moments in the presence of the beautiful. When
we wanted to name the time when we abandoned superstition and embraced
rationality, we called it The En-light-enment. Perhaps human beings are
responding to the great shift from the industrial machine to the intelligent
machine by abandoning the principles of Enlightenment. Is the return to
religious fundamentalism--whether manifested as the Jihad, the Falun Gong,
the Faith-Based Government, or Madonna embracing Kabbalah--really a symptom
of a collective yearning for a pre-rational innocence/ignorance? In our
heart of hearts, do we long for the time when the earth was the center of
the universe, when the grand Inquisitor told us the one truth, and when the
boundaries of the known world were visible from our window?

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My interest is in synthetic intelligence, the osculating space between the machine
phylum and artificial intelligence that desires qualities of becoming human. War in
the age of intelligent machines incorporated into the ...